ARM getting server traction

“Our first partners are starting to get their first results,” Pete Hutton executive v-p and president of ARM’s product group told Electronics Weekly.

Hutton sees the server market as a 50 million unit a year opportunity and ARM aspires to a 5-10% market share by 2017.

This year it sees itself gaining a ‘single digit percentage’ market share.

Asked if the collapse of Calxeda has had any effect on ARM’s momentum in servers, Hutton replied: “It’s unfortunate for them. We’ve hired a few of their guys. They tried to go with 32-bit but the market really wants 64-bit and those guys are getting traction.”

A major plus for ARM’s move into servers is the launch of AMD’s ARM-based server offerings. “Their experience in this space is a real advantage,” said Hutton.

However the biggest advantage ARM has in the server space is the opportunity it gives customers to customise their ARM-based SoCs for servers.

Intel just provides a ready-made chip and peripherals and the customer can take it or leave it – but if an ARM core is used a customer can tailor the server SoC precisely to his requirement.

With the big datacentre operators – Microsoft, Amazon, Facebook, Google et al – increasingly drawing up their own server specs which they then bung over to the Taiwan OEMs for implementation, the customisation opportunity is becoming increasingly valuable.